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Jonathan Haidt Changes His Situation

New York University Stern School of Business today announced that Jonathan Haidt will join its faculty in the fall of 2012 as the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership. Haidt has served as the Henry Kaufman Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Stern for the 2011-12 academic year.

“Every economic crisis seems to evoke a renewed call for business schools to redouble their emphasis on ethics. The repeated nature of these exhortations suggests that the problem may not be a lack of attention to the issue but the need for thoughtful new approaches. As one of the founders and the pre-eminent researcher in the field of moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt has changed the way that we look at ethics and moral behavior. At Stern, he will bring his knowledge to bear upon questions of design for ethical business systems,” said Peter Henry, dean of NYU Stern.

Haidt is widely recognized for research on the intuitive foundations of morality and how morality and emotion vary across cultures. In recent years, he has used moral psychology to understand America’s ideological and hyper-partisanship. This work is the focus of his best-selling new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. His work draws consistent praise from both sides of the political spectrum, and is covered often in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Within the Business and Society Program at NYU Stern, Haidt aims to integrate research on moral psychology with research and theory in business ethics, seeking the best ways to create organizations that function as ethical systems, with only minimal need for directly training people to behave ethically. He will create a course at Stern called “Ethical Systems Design.”

Before joining Stern, Haidt was a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia for 16 years, and served as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor at Princeton University in 2006-2007. He was the 2001 winner of the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology, and a 2004 winner of the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award, conferred by Governor Mark Warner. In addition to his new book, Professor also is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.